I study how people and places continually shape one another.
My work spans multiple scales—from the developmental onset of identity to large‑scale cultural patterns shaped by geography and mobility.
During my doctoral research at The New School for Social Research, I introduced the concept of placefulness—the degree to which people’s sense of self is tied to specific environments—along with a harmonic‑mean measure of residential stability that complements existing mobility metrics. These frameworks reveal how spatial stability and movement leave lasting psychological traces, from self‑concepts and prosocial decision‑making to systematic patterns in memory encoding. Evidence includes studies with more than 1,400 individuals in Japan and the United States—two societies that differ starkly in ecological and cultural contexts.
My approach is socioecological. Currently, I examine how elevational variability, soil composition, and infrastructure channel human behavior and cultural life. Projects include cross‑national studies linking rugged terrain to hierarchy endorsement and religious cognition; urban analyses of parking orientation as a proxy for time horizons; and experiments extending my doctoral work to uncover domain‑variant risk‑taking across ecological contexts.
Outside shapes inside. Environments don’t merely surround us—they participate in making us who we are. Through ongoing international collaborations, I extend this lens to show how variations in frictions and affordances unlock creativity, adaptation, and resilience.
I welcome collaboration and dialogue.